Intense personal experience of South Africa's brutal social system,
a sense of stifled creativity, and a distaste for politics made Bessie
Head leave for Botswana on an exit permit at the age of 27. There, in her
chosen rural haven of Serowe, and despite a severe mental breakdown, she
wrote novels and stories that earned her international recognition as one
of Africa's most remarkable and individual writers. The publication at last of The Cardinals--thought to be the first
long piece of fiction Head produced and the only one she ever set in South
Africa--is an exciting literary event. After a childhood of poverty and abuse in the slums of Cape Town, the
protagonist unexpectedly lands a job as a reporter in the offices of African
Beat. She is too withdrawn to flourish in her new world and struggles to
find her identity as a woman and a writer against the muckraking demanded
by her editors and the sexism of the newsroom. Johnny believes in her,
but his faith carries its own dangers. Questions of origins, identity,
sexuality, writing, love, revenge, and politics unite to propel the characters
to joy while disaster waits. The seven short pieces of fiction included in this volume come from
the years immediately after Bessie Head went to Botswana. Among them is
"Earth Love," which she called the "goddam best bit of writing
I ever did." Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us! During her lifetime, Bessie Head was hailed as one of Africa's greatest
writers. This anthology of stories, personal observations, and historic
legends -- some previously unpublished -- is a fitting tribute to her versatility
and power as a storyteller and commentator. Tales of Tenderness and
Power draws on writings that have roots in the author's own experience
in Botswana. It reflects her fascination with the country's people and
their history and her identification with individuals and their conflicting
emotions. She enjoyed observing, smiling, forgiving, or raging -- and then
recording. These tales reveal her affinity with human goodness and tenderness
and her fear and resentment of the misuse of power. Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us! Autobiographical Writings "I need a quiet backwater and a sense of living as though I am
barely alive on the earth, treading a small, careful pathway through life.''
A Woman Alone is a collection of autobiographical writings, sketches,
and essays that covers the entire span of Bessie Head's creative life,
up to her death in 1986 at the age of 49. It reveals a woman of great sensitivity
and vitality, inspired through her knowledge of suffering with "a
reverence for ordinary people'' and finding some healing for her own anguish
in a quiet corner of Africa. Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us! It is never clear to Elizabeth whether the mission school principal's
cruel revelation of her origins is at the bottom of her mental breakdown.
She has left South Africa with her son and is living in the village of
Motabeng, the place of sand, in Botswana where there are no street lights
at night. Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us! A sequence of Botswana village tales about subjects such as the breakdown
of family life and the position of women in this society told with all
the skill that one has come to expect of Bessie Head. Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us! Margaret Cadmore, an orphaned Masarwa girl, comes to Dilepe to teach,
only to discover that in this remote Botswana village her own people are
treated as outcasts. In the love story and intrigue that follows, Bessie
Head brilliantly combines a portrait of loneliness with a rich affirmation
of the mystery and spirituality of life. Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us! An extraordinary feat of re-creation of an African village's recent
past through the words and memories of its inhabitants. Bessie Head captures
the life of this community with all her skill as a novelist. It will lead
readers to make comparisons with their own villages wherever they are.
Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us! The poverty-stricken village of Golema Mmidi, in the heart of rural
Botswana, offers a haven to the exiles gathered there. Makhaya, a political
refugee from South Africa, becomes involved with an English agricultural
expert and the villagers as they struggle to revolutionize their traditional
subsistence farming methods by introducing modern techniques. The pressures
of tradition, the opposition of the local chief and, above all, the harsh
climate threaten to bring tragedy to the community, but strangely, there
remains a hope for the future. Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us! "These 27 short stories are so moving that I had to stop reading
after each one until my sensibilities readjusted... [this] book makes an
important contribution to our understanding of what life has been like
for those who have been living, or dying, with the reality of apartheid."
The issue of apartheid pervades this vibrant collection of 27 South
African short stories written between 1945 and 1992. Includes contributions
from such celebrated writers as Bessie Head, Alex La Guma, and Nobel Prize
winner Nadine Gordimer. Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us! Of the title story, which like the others is set in Mozambique, Lewis
Nkosi has said, "...a hauntingly beautiful story, whose simplicity
of narrative conceals an extraordinary sharp poetic insight into the theme
of life and death, the impulses of love and violence..." Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us! "It is a quietly powerful narrative...an unforgettable saga..."
-- Sunday Mail, Harare The shadows of war, death, and life itself loom large in this second
novel by the award-winning author of Bones. Inspired by two young lovers
who opted for death instead of life, Shadows tells the story of
innocents caught in a world where people have little control over their
own lives. Constrained by poverty and harsh colonial laws, the lovers struggle
to survive in a barren land and cope with the conflicting demands of a
liberation war in which death is a brutal reality. Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us! Winner of the 1989 Noma Award "A powerful, moving, and ambitious novel, written with exceptional
linguistic control, plumbing the depths of human suffering but having the
wisdom to hope..." Bones is a poetic novel about the guerilla fight for freedom
in Zimbabwe, but unlike a conventional novel, all the action is interior
monologues -- some by specific characters, others by representatives of
certain types produced by colonial history, or by spirits. The story involves
a mother's love, and a lover's yearning, for a young man who has joined
the freedom fighters. Hove captures the ambivalence and conflicts of loyalties
in the attitude of the peasants towards the guerillas, and underscores
the state's indifference to the lives of ordinary people. Top of Form | African Literature
Index | African Writers Index | E-mail us!
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This page has had,
African Writers Index
English, 
French, Bilingual, 
Bessie HEAD
The Cardinals
Tales of Tenderness and Power
A Woman Alone
A Question of Power
A Collector of Treasures
Maru
Serowe
The Village of the Rain-Wind
When Rain Clouds Gather
Edited by Denis Hirson 
The
Heinemann Book of South African Short Stories
--KLIATT
Luis Bernardo HONWANA We Killed Mangy-Dog and Other Stories
Translated by Dorothy Guedes
Chenjerai HOVE Shadows
Bones
- Noma Award Citation
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